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These things include equal pay, management positions, affordable day care, parental leave, abortion rights, a place on corporate boards, the chance to run provinces, cities and nations, and protection from violent attack, among a multiplicity of things.

Men will one day be partners in this effort. They often are not.

The problem is that women, especially feminists, are distracted from these crucial matters by petty internal squabbles.

I’m saying “we” but that’s the coward’s way out. I can’t pretend to speak for all women. And there are women I don’t want to speak for.

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Recently, I did a Q&A session for a terrific group of human rights lawyers in Toronto. They work long hours and do good things. I told them what I always tell such groups, that they must reach out in every way possible, making their voices heard.

When talking to media about human rights cases, best include photos of the people involved, I said. Readers can understand complaints but photos create a human connection. I also mentioned women’s rights. We need women to be promoted, we want them on boards. As for our failure thus far, well, women running the work world is a new concept in the great span of human history.

A young black lawyer took issue. She had no time for me, with my demand for “hetero-normative family” photos. And women in the workplace? Not new at all. Her grandmother had been working long before this concept even came up. She was sneering, I was aghast.

But I meant photos of people, I wanted to tell her, hetero-normative or not. (Note to self: Look up “hetero-normative.”) I meant that 3 billion working women wanted parity. Aren’t we on the same side, I wanted to wail. But she loudly left the room as I tried to explain myself.

She meant I was too non-black to understand black women’s history. I thought this unfair. My father was from India, my mother Scottish. But no, her race trumped my “bi-raciality.” (Note to self: Check if actual word.)

If you have the patience for another example of well-intentioned women quarrelling over scraps, read the online attack on Louise Mensch, the British former Conservative MP, who wrote a blog piece (reprinted in the Guardian) attacking feminists for their use of “privilege-checking” and “intersectionality.”

“Check your privilege” means that feminists should not mock racists if the racists are poor. This means that feminists are banned from attacking the racist English Defence League on Twitter (for “beer bellies, bad tattoos, thuggery and tacky ‘designer’clothing”) because those words are “class-based.”

Mensch’s point was that while feminists argued over whether anti-racist “classism” was acceptable, the racists were romping about with their special little flags, still loudly racist.

“Intersectionality” — or what Mensch called “intersectional bollocks” — is more complicated. As the feminist Laurie Penny wrote in a subsequent attack on Mensch, it means you can’t discuss class privilege “without also talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice versa.”

My heart sinks. This column contains 700 words and no more. I often discuss class in terms of money (both inherited and earned) sans jargon. Blind to intersectionality, I still say welfare payments are far too low in Ontario. People go hungry. They eat cheap junk food.

Oh no. That verges on “fattist.” Mensch got in trouble with feminists for saying that “vertical stripes don’t make you look thinner, (exercise) makes you look thinner.” But why should Mensch want to look thinner, feminists responded on Twitter. Fattism!

Feminist jargon comes from Women’s Studies, I’m sorry to say, and as nice as The Miss G Project sounds, that’s why I was always a little dubious about Gender Studies being taught in Ontario high schools. Jargon is incoherent. It confuses and silences people.

Mensch, who admittedly can be extremely odd at times, was right to defend her “reality-based feminism.” It means improving women’s lives without Life of Brian levels of stupidity, without “the Judean People’s Front screeching ‘Splitters!’ at the People’s Front of Judea.”

It’s like the anti-choicers saying feminists should be opposed to “anti-girl sex-selective abortion of the pre-born,” as if all females were in a worldwide club desperate for new members.

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